CHAPTER 11
SLICKERED AND BOOTED, WEARING THE SAME jeans and wool sweater as before, sitting behind the wheel of his silver BMW, Corky Laputa felt stifled by a frustration as heavy and suffocating as a fur coat.
Although his shirt wasn?t buttoned to the top, anger pinched his throat as tight as if he?d squeezed his sixteen-inch neck into a fifteen-inch collar.
He wanted to drive to West Hollywood and kill Reynerd.
Such impulses must be resisted, of course, for though he dreamed of a societal collapse into complete lawlessness, from which a new order would arise, the laws against murder remained in effect. They were still enforced.
Corky was a revolutionary, but not a martyr.
He understood the need to balance radical action with patience.
He recognized the effective limits of anarchic rage.
To calm himself, he ate a candy bar.
Contrary to the claims of organized medicine, both the greed-corrupted Western variety and the spiritually smug Eastern brand, refined sugar did not make Corky hyperkinetic. Sucrose soothed him.
[82] Very old people, nerves rubbed to an excruciating sensitivity by life and its disappointments, had long known about the mollifying effect of excess sugar. The farther their hopes and dreams receded from their grasp, the more their diets sweetened to include ice cream by the quart, rich cookies in giant economy-size boxes, and chocolate in every form from nonpareils to Hershey?s Kisses, even to Easter-basket bunnies that they could brutally dismember and consume for a double enjoyment.
In her later years, his mother had been an ice-cream junkie. Ice cream for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Ice cream in parfait glasses, in huge bowls, eaten directly from the carton.
She hogged down enough ice cream to clog a network of arteries stretching from California to the moon and back. For a while Corky had assumed that she was committing suicide by cholesterol.
Instead of spooning herself into heart failure, she appeared to grow healthier. She acquired a glow in the face and a brightness in the eyes that she?d never had before, not even in her youth.
Gallons, barrels, troughs of Chocolate Mint Madness, Peanut-Butter-and-Chocolate Fantasy, Maple Walnut Delight, and a double dozen other flavors seemed to turn back her biological clock as the waters of a thousand fountains had failed to turn back that of Ponce de Leon.
Corky had begun to think that in the case of his mother?s unique metabolism, the key to immortality might be butterfat. So he killed her.
If she had been willing to share some of her money while still alive, he would have allowed her to live. He wasn?t greedy.
She had not been a believer in generosity or even in parental responsibility, however, and she cared not at all about his comfort or his needs. He?d been concerned that eventually she would change her will and stiff him forever, sheerly for the pleasure of doing so.
In her working years, his mother had been a university professor of economics, specializing in Marxist economic models and the vicious departmental politics of academia.
[83] She had believed in nothing more than the righteousness of envy and the power of hatred. When both beliefs proved hollow, she had not abandoned either, but had supplemented them with ice cream.
Corky didn?t hate his mother. He didn?t hate anyone.
He didn?t envy anyone, either.
Having seen those gods fail his mother, he had rejected both. He did not wish to grow old with no comfort but his favorite premium brand of coconut fudge.
Four years ago, paying her a secret visit with the intention of quickly and mercifully smothering her in her sleep, he had instead beaten her to death with a fireplace poker, as if he were acting out a story begun by Anne Tyler in an ironic mood and roughly finished by a furious Norman Mailer.
Though unplanned, the exercise with the poker proved cathartic. Not that he?d taken pleasure in the violence. He had not.
The decision to murder her had really been as unemotional as any decision to purchase the stock of a blue-chip corporation, and the killing itself had been conducted with the same cool efficiency with which he would have executed any stock-market investment.
Being an economist, his mother surely had understood.
His alibi had been unassailable. He inherited her estate. Life went on. His life, anyway.
Now, as he finished the candy bar, he felt sugar-soothed and chocolate-coddled.
He still wanted to kill Reynerd, but the unwise urgency of the compulsion had passed. He would take time to plan the hit.
When he acted, he would follow his scheme faithfully. This time, pillow would not become poker.
Noticing that the yellow slicker had shed a lot of water on the seat, he sighed but did nothing. Corky was too committed an anarchist to care about the upholstery.
Besides, he had Reynerd to brood about. A perpetual adolescent [84] inside a dour exterior, Rolf had been unable to resist the temptation to deliver the sixth box in person. Looking for a thrill.
The fool had thought that perimeter security cameras did not exist solely because he himself could not spot them.
Are there no other planets in the solar system, Corky had asked him, just because you can?t locate them in the sky?
When Ethan Truman, Manheim?s security chief, came calling, Reynerd had been stunned. By his admission, he behaved suspiciously.
As Corky wadded up the candy wrapper and stuffed it into the trash bag, he wished that he could dispose of Reynerd as easily.
Suddenly rain fell more heavily than at any previous moment of the storm. The deluge knocked stubborn acorns from the oak under which he had parked, and cast them across the BMW. They rattled off the paint work and surely marred it, snapped off the windshield but did not crack it.
He didn?t have to sit here, in a danger of acorns, plotting Reynerd?s demise, until a rotting thousand-pound limb broke free, fell on the car, and crushed him for his trouble. He could get on with his day and mentally draw up blueprints for the murder while he attended to other business.
Corky drove a few miles to a popular upscale shopping mall and parked in the underground garage.
He got out of the BMW, stripped off his slicker and his droopy rain hat, which he tossed onto the floor of the car. He shrugged into a tweed sports coat that complemented his sweater and jeans.
An elevator carried him from subterranean realms to the highest of two floors of shops, restaurants, and attractions. The arcade was on this top level.
With school out, kids crowded around the arcade games. Most were in their early teens.
The machines beeped, rang, tolled, chimed, bleated, tweedled, [85] whistled, rattattooed, boomed, shrieked, squealed, ululated, roared like gunning engines, emitted scraps of bombastic music, the screams of virtual victims, twinkled, flashed, strobed, and scintillated in all known colors, and swallowed quarters, dollars, more voraciously even than the iconic Pac-Man had once gobbled cookies off a million arcade screens in an era now quaint if not unknown to the current crowd.
Wandering among the machines, Corky distributed free drugs to the kids.
These small plastic bags each contained eight doses of Ecstasy-or Extasy, if you?d gone to a public school-with a block-lettered label that promised FREE X, and then suggested, JUST REMEMBER WHO YOUR FRIEND IS.
He was pretending to be a dealer drumming up business. He never expected to see any of these brats again.
Some kids accepted the packets, thought it was cool.
Others showed no interest. Of those who declined, none made an effort to report him to anyone; nobody liked a rat.
In a few instances, Corky slipped the bags into kids? jacket pockets without their knowledge. Let them find it later, be amazed.
Some would take the stuff. Some would throw it away or give it away. In the end, he would have succeeded in contaminating a few more brains.
Truth: He wasn?t interested in creating addicts. He would have given away heroin or even crack cocaine if that had been his goal.
Scientific studies of Ecstasy revealed that five years after taking just a single dose, the user continued to exhibit lingering changes in brain chemistry. After regular use, permanent brain damage could ensue.
Some oncologists and neurologists suggested that in the decades to come, the current high incidence of Ecstasy use would produce a dramatic increase in early-onset cancerous brain tumors, as well as a [86] decrease in the cognitive abilities of hundreds of thousands if not millions of citizens.
Eight-dose giveaways like this would not facilitate the collapse of civilization overnight. Corky was committed to long-term effect.
He never carried more than fifteen bags, and once he started to hand them out, he made a point of ridding himself of them quickly. Too clever to get caught holding, he was in and out of the arcade in three minutes.
Because he didn?t need to pause to make a sale, the staff didn?t have an opportunity to notice him. By the time he left the arcade, he was just another shopper: nothing incriminating in his pockets.
At a Starbucks, he bought a double latte, and sipped it at one of their tables on the promenade, watching the parade of humanity in all its absurdity.
After finishing the coffee, he went to a department store. He needed socks.